End of a Samurai Comic

By RICHARD CORLISS

John Belushi: 1949-1982

It was all too trite and tragic. Another pop star found in a hotel room, dead of undetermined causes at an obscenely early age. In their blackest moods, the writers for NBC's original Saturday Night Live might have used these facts to make a satiric point about the self-destruction of performers who spoke most electrifyingly to their generation. And at the end of the skit, the victim--played by SNL 's reigning cutup, John Belushi--would have sprung back to life, bounced to his feet and bellowed: "But no-o-o-o!" But yes. Late last week, in a bungalow of West Hollywood's Hotel Chateau Marmont, Belushi--the Blues Brother, the raging bull of Animal House, the samurai comic of cabaret, TV and the movies--was found dead. He was 33.

Police reported that Belushi's physical trainer had arrived at the hotel early Friday afternoon and found the actor curled naked and unconscious on his bungalow bed. A hotel security guard attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation without success. By the time the corpse, covered with a brown blanket, was removed from the hotel, all elements of a Hollywood creep show were in place: stories of a mysterious woman in Belushi's room early that morning; rumors of the star's traveling with a cocaine crowd; paparazzi shouting and shoving and climbing over police cars to catch the action. Los Angeles Police Lieutenant Dan Cooke said that Belushi's death "appeared to have been from natural causes." By week's end the precise cause was still unclear.

It was a bizarre ending for this eldest son of an Albanian immigrant who had become a Chicago restaurateur. (Another son, Jim, followed his brother into revue and TV comedy.) Always restless and volatile, John sped through a typical Midwestern youth: football, rock-band drummer high school high jinks, a brief spell at the University of Michigan. Later, he married (and stayed married to) his high school sweetheart, Judith Jacklin. In the early '70s he joined Chicago's Second City troupe, and after playing in a Manhattan revue, National Lampoon's Lemmings, was hired for SNL in 1975.

There Belushi blossomed into an archangel of the grotesque. His face--round and blandly menacing in repose, like a middle-level Mafioso's--could contort into semblances of slashing samurai, killer bees, Joe Cocker or Marlon Brando. Belushi's body, stolid as a '53 Studebaker, could erupt in spasms of grace. As one of the Blues Brothers, the blue-eyed soul group that brought Belushi a platinum record and a big-budget movie, this slab in a black suit would suddenly turn a series of split-second cartwheels, like a hippo Baryshnikov. Belushi was the ideal comic complement to his SNL colleague, close friend and fellow Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd. But whereas Aykroyd disappears into his wicked, perfectly pitched characterizations, Belushi was a Method mimic. His impersonations seemed fun-house mirrors of his own turbulence. They were ego run wild. That gave them a special danger, and Belushi his unique appeal to a decade of kids ready for high-octane partying, kamikaze car rides, sirens screeching late into every Saturday night.

Belushi kept insisting that it was all just an act. "If people want to think that I'm a drug-crazed anarchist and it brings them into the theaters, that's fine," he said in 1980. "Actually, I'm a pretty boring guy most of the time." But it was the anarchist image that made him a movie star with Animal House (1978). The role of Bluto Blutarsky was just a featured part, not much larger than the ones he played in Old Boyfriends and Goin' South. But audiences cheered as Bluto bellowed "Food fight!" in a crowded cafeteria, or scaled CONTACT the walls of a sorority, or totaled a small-town parade. Belushi, who left SNL in 1979, teamed with Aykroyd for two even more manic movies, 1941 and The Blues Brothers, which extorted laughs from car and plane wrecks. Trash the world, I want to get off.

In his last two films, Continental Divide and Neighbors, Belushi played ordinary guys beset and attracted by extraordinary eccentrics. He might have been announcing that Animal John was also a mensch, but it is more likely he was simply expanding his range toward more traditional character parts. After a few years of shooting stardom, Belushi was inching to ward mid-life without another climax immediately in view. Now it has found him. In his early days with Lemmings, he had mocked celebrity burnout with the All-Star Dead Band -- Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. Less than a decade later, the samurai comic had provided another ghastly punch line to his own joke. This time, no one was laughing.

-- By Richard Corliss

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